Why new digital marketing hires should make UX their top priority

New digital marketing hires are faced with the daunting challenge of creating both quick wins and successful long-term initiatives for their new organization’s growth. New hires at the director level and above usually come in because something isn’t working in the marketing function of the company, or there’s an initiative from the past regime that needs to be rectified. In some cases, a new marketing hire is the first ever to specifically focus on the digital aspects of marketing for his or her new company.

Digital content platforms and sales channels seem to be a logical place to start, but can require a long implementation or endure lengthy sales cycles before showing measurable effects on revenue. The challenges associated with measuring marketing impact is in line with research demonstrating that attribution is the top priority for marketers in 2016. However, strong user experience and user-centered design best practices have consistently demonstrated improvement on revenue attributed to marketing.

But it’s true that one of the key initiatives to have an early and lasting impact is to enhance the user experience of a company’s digital products. Digital marketers have a responsibility to optimize company websites and microsites, digital content, and social media. As marketers build trust within their organization, they can drive the experience of both internal-facing tools and provide input into the company’s core products?—?whether it’s in the technology industry or any other. The subsequent evolution of a digital marketer, the growth hacker, gets involved in the product development phase from idea inception. But a marketer has to begin at the beginning.

Stakeholders

Great marketers know the environment of their organization’s stakeholders, and spend time with them to listen. Marketing content from the past should be absorbed in their spare time, but face-to-face time with a variety of stakeholders should be the priority. Some of most important work is in the internal selling that will drive influencer buy-in and funding for new digital marketing projects.

Effective communication with salespeople, creatives, and engineers is critical. Salespeople need to be persuaded that delivering marketing-tested messages will generate sales and, in return, they will provide great customer insight. Product engineers need good data about how users are engaging with the product and what potential users need. IT teams will provide valuable input about internal resources and systems that can be leveraged effectively. Marketers should even collaborate with HR to ensure that job candidates have a great user experience during the application process so they become positive influencers too.

Stakeholders can also be a great resource for their particular perspective on how customers think and behave. Building great customer experiences comes down to more than understanding these users at a demographic level?—?instead, it’s critically important to empathize with and design for users at the psychographic level, understanding their needs and intentions. Audience research is an effective tool to generate these insights, but building upon the experience and institutional knowledge of customer-oriented stakeholders is a great start for new digital marketers.

User Research

Understanding an audience is key to just about everything good that can emerge from a marketing department. “You are not your user” is an oft repeated mantra in marketing departments that emphasize the need for research as a reminder that a marketer can never look at their own product objectively. User research is a gold mine that marketing can return to for direction over and over again whenever they get stuck.

A marketing function needs to start with a 360-degree view of demographic characteristics of its audience for digital platforms?—?including age, gender, income level, and so on. That data could come from a variety of sources, and it may also identify blind spots in current analytics?—?or the lack of useful analytics altogether. Effective use of analytics is imperative in driving long-term digital strategy.

Additionally, good marketers perform original research about the thought processes and intentions of their users. Psychographic research can span interviews, focus groups, surveys and user testing. This research enables a marketing department to develop real insight on customers and potential customers. Leverage these findings to build marketing personas for optimal return on investment. Developing these personas can be a significant quick win to share with your business stakeholders while time and energy are also focused on long-term projects.

Resources

Any new marketing hire must know the capabilities of internal resources and be realistic about where help is needed. Does this company have a dedicated team for these digital platforms? Unless the core operation of a marketer’s business is digital product development, it’s unlikely that a company can provide truly differentiated and innovative internal resources for web and mobile apps. Additionally, how soon IT resources can be allocated and how fast they will work will always be outstanding question marks.

It’s important to find expert partners to accelerate the improvement of user experience for web and mobile products. Considering that current staff and processes got the user experience to the point where change felt necessary by company management, it seems unlikely that they would be able to do something significantly better unless conditions change drastically.

Expectation setting is also something a marketer has to take on. Start conversations with partners early to validate ideas and identify potential red flags with them. This ensures that budgets are set correctly and that your stakeholders have a better idea of time to market.

Innovation

A good user experience must be ambitious and original. Business Insider reports that originality is rapidly becoming the key factor in usability scores. Users judge a company’s app both on what it does well and what it does differently than its competitors apps. Good marketers understand the competition’s digital marketing inside and out to identify where the bar is set.

The good news is that both findings from user research and careful monitoring of analytics combined can become a great source for experimental ideas. Innovation can be a repeatable process, and as new products are released, they will produce new interactions with users and new analytics data to help enhance current and future products.

For more about how we’ve helped new digital marketers get big wins with UX, visit us at punchkick.com